I Heart Oprah Magazine

I bought the current issue of Oprah Magazine. For myself. For real. The cover promises "OPRAH'S PRIVATE PHOTOS... We gave her a camera, she gives us a snapshot of her perfect lazy Sunday." The actual article is the absolute last content in the magazine - right inside the back cover but before the important inside-the-back-cover advertising; it has been tucked away as far as the editors/art directors could manage. It doesn't fit the magazine.

TANGENT: But this is proof that a publication/creative enterprise ruled by the proverbial benevolent dictator will always offer things that a rule-by-committee "Poochie" rag will miss. Clearly this article is off the mark regarding the message/image/whatever of the magazine - and the images are not of the same quality as all the editorial and ad stuff - but if Oprah insists that it goes in this issue, by god it's going in this issue. If nothing else, Oprah got me to buy one more of her magazines than I ever would have otherwise. So in the case study of whether Michael Gregory would buy this magazine based on content, Oprah's call on including her own snapshots was a good one.

BTW I wonder what kind of camera Oprah uses. I love the idea of her swatting at the etherial mirages of stasis in front of her with a midrange Canon A-series Powershot, for which she sent a staff member to Wal-Mart. "Could you run to Best Buy and get me a camera? Nothing too big, but I want one that takes good pictures."

What stuck me about the article itself was how heartening it is to learn that Oprah - one of the single richest people in the world - has the exact same impulse as everyone else to savor and try to capture small, enjoyable parcels of time - and especially that she struggles with it, just like the rest of it.

Her pictures are not great photography. They are better than those of any other non-serious photographer in her age group that I know personally - probably her friends get her unsolicited "Look what I did this weekend!" emails full of her pictures and actually reply saying how great her pictures are - but she's not an accomplished artist.

Even when you have some attainment in the basic grammar of the visual arts, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world to conjugate the simplest sentence. Even with supernatural Photoshopping skill and every other advantage, it is hard to convert intent into a coherent composition.

So I guess I was happy to see that Oprah - a person who probably has access to literally any resource extant on earth for making an image - struggles like the rest of us. She chose to try to capture by herself the impressions of a pleasant afternoon in her backyard, and she had a rough ride. She does manage to paste together a rickety account, spanning multiple images and heavy captioning, but clearly it was not easy. And for some odd reason I was glad to discover that Oprah, obviously a first-rate conversationalist, is not a great writer; she has good insights and gets the point across just fine, but Faulkner she is not.

Speaking of poor writing, I'm still not sure what I learned from this, what's my point, why I starting writing this blog post.

Man, how great would that be if Oprah got her camera from the disounted/discontinued bin?! And wouldn't it be awesome if she used that little mini-USB cable to connect the camera to the computer? You know she printed 4x6's of every one of her snapshots on a POS compact printer she [her assistant] got at the same electronics/discount store. God, she probably even set aside an 8x10" for her ever-growing stack of things to frame/scapbook/decoupage/whatever that she is realistically never going to have time for.